John Paul DeWitt of CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network
No. 2: New York
Main city population: 8,175,133
Metropolitan population: 18,897,109
Segregation level (dissimilarity): 78.04
New York escaped the decay that has struck manufacturing cities across the Northeast and Midwest. But it hasn’t shaken the lines that divide the Rust Belt by race: New York remains the second most segregated metro area in the country.
“Here in the home of limousine liberalism, the first part of the problem is to get anyone to stop talking about ‘diversity’ in the aggregate long enough to acknowledge that municipal and neighborhood segregation didn’t just drop from the sky … and isn’t simply a function of economics or of self-selection,” Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center, says. “Rather [it] was created by explicitly discriminatory conduct on the part of both public and private actors over the course of decades. Patterns, once established, tend to stay in place unless active steps are taken to undo them.”
In 2009, the Obama administration signed a landmark consent decree with Westchester County, which is nearly 80 percent white. A lawsuit filed by the Anti-Discrimination Center had charged the county with misrepresenting its affordable housing efforts to the federal government. The suit received widespread media attention and was seen as a blow to racially and economically exclusive municipalities nationwide. But Gurian says the decree hasn’t been enforced.
“The problem is not just a Westchester problem: Over 1,000 jurisdictions across the country are looking to see whether the federal government will … hold Westchester’s feet to the fire,” he wrote. “It is especially critical that there be enforcement because the Westchester County executive, Rob Astorino, has publicly defied lawful federal authority.”
Resistance to desegregation is hard to overcome. In the 1940s, MetLife refused to rent apartments to blacks in Manhattan’s sprawling Stuyvesant Town development. In the 1980s, Yonkers almost bankrupted itself fighting an effort to build affordable housing on the city’s white east side. New York is also one of two cities, alongside Los Angeles, with sky-high segregation of Latinos.
Ingrid Gould Ellen, an urban planning and public policy professor at New York University, says that New York City is somewhat more integrated than the data would suggest, because it is far denser than most cities. Since census tracts are made up by population, tracts in New York tend to be very small.
“What happens is that we’re not making apples to apples comparisons. The neighborhoods in Atlanta and Houston are 10 times the size of neighborhoods in New York City physically,” she says. “The census tracts are so much smaller, so you’re likely to cross over a number of census tracts every day.”
The daily commute of the average New Yorker also lessens racial isolation. Thanks to the dominance of public transit, intra-city travel tends to be a diverse experience.
“People are much heavier users of public transit than other parts of the country,” says Ellen. “The New York-L.A. comparison: I live down the street from my office but I’m in the subway most days. I’m literally bumping elbows with people from all over the world. Whereas if I’m in L.A., I get in my car in my all white neighborhood, and drive to work. It’s very different.”
